Strain review: Blue Dream

You were probably somewhere at some point in 2011 smoking some Blue Dream. It was nearly a decade old by then — a strain that was very much ascending and having its moment, bringing everybody, noobs and novices, smoking together at that moment right before legalization. The high-pinene, Sativa-dominant that mixes Blueberry and Haze was showing up in plenty of rap lyrics too (seriously one of the best barometers of cultural breaking points is when you hear it on the radio) and there was even a whole mixtape named after it: Juicy J’s 2011 Blue Dream and Lean, 28 tracks of the Three 6 Mafia fight-rap legend yelling about getting high over trap songs that sound like they’re running out of batteries, moaning, glitching, whining. “You say no to drugs, Juicy J can’t,” he raps early on, and well you get the point right there, though don’t sleep on “Go to jail, I’m posting bail / Blue Dream, I know it well,” as he raps on “Stoners Night Pt. 2.” Those are lines with a certain wizened William Carlos Williams quality to them if you ask me.

Seven years later though, Blue Dream seems to be on the descent: a best-seller for three years straight in Colorado before falling into second place in 2017 when it was usurped by the persistent up-up-up-ness of Durban Poison — that in the meantime, has gotten involved in a number of especially tangled and tingly strains (Tangie Dream, Blue Dream Shishkaberry, Cookies and Dream, Dream Queen, all previously reviewed here). Blue Dream’s not the focus, but there for stability and some force, the thing that keeps it all moving along and yet can still surprise you and do some wild shit, especially when the situation and dare I say it, vibes man, are just right.

That’s what happened to me when I smoked some over the weekend. Blue Dream’s relatively simple, unfussy high revealed itself again. Early in the morning after a night out, both its heady downer qualities and simultaneous loopy, lithe tingling promenaded and my thoughts curled into other thoughts and then they all flattened out in front of me. I could find all the connections if I felt like it or the thoughts could all sit out there, disconnected, near each other, frozen up, nervous and not quite touching. And that was OK; it would all come together soon enough, I just knew it and felt it. Time moved slow, the conversation with a like-minded smoker was unhurried in the best way. Time took its time. It had me thinking of the line “hours that float idly down,” from the William Carlos Williams poem “Blizzard.” Blue Dream — a weed that invokes both Juicy J and William Carlos Williams apparently, an ideal nightcap, still very, very good.